


this is all i ever was

by idekman



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Language of Flowers, medium levels of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 06:21:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12788661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idekman/pseuds/idekman
Summary: 'I always thought you liked tulips.'Karen takes the pot of roses from him, places it gingerly back on the windowsill. He listens to her fiddle with it, twist it this way and that – finding the best spot for it in the sun, he realises.'Maybe. Before.'-prompt: kastle through matt's eyes





	this is all i ever was

He’s trying not to bring more chaos and death to her doorstep, so he creeps in through her window at three a.m.

She stabs him in the arm with a kitchen knife.

 

‘Jesus fucking _Christ_ Matt,’ she hisses at him. The emergency room reflects white-hot noise back at them, and the stench of bleach stings at his nose. She’d screamed at him the entire ride here, full of _how could you_ and _I thought you were dead_ even as he’d gritted his teeth around the pain of the knife still sticking out of his arm and asked, gently, _how’ve you been Karen?_

  

She doesn’t talk to him for another two weeks. The next time he goes to see her, he knocks on her apartment door with flowers. An apology, of sorts. He can’t figure out the way her heart skips a beat when she sees them in his hands, but she takes them anyway. He listens to the way she thuds something down on the table and goes over, traces a finger across them. Petals. Stems – in a glass. Maybe she doesn’t have a vase. Or, more likely, knowing Karen, she has one, but had shoved the bouquet in a water glass anyway as a pointed aside –

His head tilts. A soft smell scratches at him, and as she chatters – aimless, wandering, still angry but not the same sheer fury she’d sent his way last time – he crosses the room until he hits the windowsill.

A little pot of roses. White, judging by those notes of violets and lemon. The soil is damp but they don’t have a ceramic pot – just the plastic kind they come in at the store. The water that drains from the bottom is warping the wood of her windowsill – he feels it under his fingers, the grain beginning to twist and rot.

Karen was never one for plants. In her first few weeks at Nelson and Murdock she’d told him, laughing, _I kill them as soon as look at them,_ as he’d laughed too as he ground dying lavender beneath his fingertips.

But these – the roses are well looked after. He can smell plant food. She’s been keeping the plant alive carefully, meticulously –

‘I always thought you liked tulips.’

He’d brought her tulips. White, too – he’d asked the lady at the store and she’d said they meant _forgiveness._

White roses – he remembers now – _white roses are for new beginnings, sometimes, or remembrance._ The woman behind the counter had paused, and he’d felt an uptick in her heartbeat. Recalling something fond, maybe. _If you wanna let someone know that you’re thinking of them – white roses. That’s what you go for._

He’d chosen the tulips.

Karen takes the pot from him, places it gingerly back on the windowsill. He listens to her fiddle with it, twist it this way and that – finding the best spot for it in the sun, he realizes.

‘Maybe. Before –’ she breaks off then, tells him that he should leave, and he does.

 

He comes back, though.

Brings white roses. The biggest bouquet in the store.

When she lets him back in the flat a few days later – she agrees, reluctantly, to get take out with him – he smells them rotting at the bottom of her waste bin.

 

Her phone won’t stop ringing.

‘You can pick up, you know,’ he tells her fondly; they’re watching a movie. He’s still not a hundred percent, after everything – recovery has been slow and achingly dull, but Karen helps, and nights like this, of startling normality in her little downtown apartment – they help too. She shakes her head – but she won’t turn it off either. The vibration is muffled and for a moment he thinks she might have put the phone away in her pocket – but he realizes, quickly, that she’s holding it in her hand, feeling it ring and ring, her palm absorbing its shake.

Eventually, after the ninth call, she sends off a text. One last, final vibration – a quick reply coming in – and he listens to the satisfying little click as she turns it off.

‘Everything alright?’ He asks, trying to not make the burning curiosity quite so obvious. She rustles, hair falling over one shoulder – a nod. At his silence, she fills in, as if she can’t help herself;

‘Just letting a friend know I’m okay.’

 

He forces himself a few streets away before he stops to listen. Pushes through the strings of sound that make up the city until he finds her voice.

He’s far enough that he can’t hear whoever’s on the other end of the line. That, at least, was deliberate – he was still learning, still picking his way around her space, her privacy. But old habits die hard, and he listens to her murmur.

 _Yeah… No, I’m okay… Matt. Mmm. Yeah, he’s – getting better, I think._ She pauses, drifts off, listening – then laughs, impossibly soft. _Okay. Speak to you soon. Get some sleep._

He’s not sure if he’s heard Karen like that before. That soft, that broken apart. Vulnerability all on show. It’s as if there’s always been this wall up that he hadn’t even known existed until now, until he’d heard her without it. Without those steely eyes and gritted teeth. He hadn’t been sure Karen was capable of gentleness until now.

 

He turns the radio up.

_\- evades police capture once again. Military veteran Frank Castle was last seen near the scene of the crime with multiple gun shot wounds, severely wounded. Police urge witnesses to come forward –_

 

The next day, he calls Karen. They’d been meant to meet at her favourite frozen yoghurt place for lunch, but she’d never shown.

She doesn’t pick up.

 

He drops by her apartment, every now and then. Not close enough to invade – stays a few streets away. Listens out for phone calls. She talks to Foggy, for a little while, just once. But then nothing.

 

They get their fro-yo a week later.

She doesn’t mention why she never picked the phone up, doesn’t explain why every part of her is drawn up tight like a bow, why she picks at her food and doesn’t finish anything. He finds himself filling the silence, a long, endless string of thoughtless chatter. She nods, every now and then, that little flip of hair tipping him off, but that’s as much as he gets, and it gnaws at him.

‘Are you mad at me?’ He asks, leaning against her door frame as he drops her off. He feels like a petulant kid.

He listens to the long breath she lets out through her teeth and for a moment he thinks she might laugh, that he might get a playful admonishment, a gentle reassurance.

(He still hasn’t forgotten that raw softness he’d overheard, and now, when he thinks of it, he flushes with embarrassment. He feels as if he’d been peeking through her doorway watching her change; interrupting something impossibly intimate, some new, hidden-away part of Karen not at all intended for him. _Get some sleep._ Like distant lovers, separated by time zones or space or cities.)

Karen is silent for a small while, and then finally tells him, voice hard;

‘Not everything’s about you Matt.’

He feels the vibration of the door slamming under his feet.

 

The heat meets him like a physical force, and he calls Karen, gently bullies her into going to Coney Island with him. The subway is like a hot tin can and they’re sweating before they even get there, and the place is packed, and he can just _feel_ Karen glaring at him.

But they find a little spot, far from the water, and as the sun finally begins to lower in the sky, people peel away, until the long, narrow strip of sand is, if not quiet, at least tolerable. Cool air and the smell of salt comes drifts over them and Karen, eternally patient, describes the colour of the sky – like dabs of candy floss strung along dusky violet, and if he tilts his head back far enough it’s almost like he can see it himself.

‘Let’s walk,’ she tells him, rolling up their towels and shoving them away in her beach bag. He lets her guide him, hand on his arm, sand between their toes and he thinks that things are almost, just barely, like before.

Still. He picks up on the smell – copper, that he realizes too late is blood. Raised to the surface of the skin – bruises mottling a face, one glancing across the cheekbone, maybe, purple along the eye – and fresher, exterior. Dried across the ribcage, near the collarbone. Dressings on gun shot wounds, judging by the stink of disinfectant and that odd, plastic smell that always comes with bandages.

And then there’s gun oil, too, and shoe polish from military-grade boots and Karen’s moving, _running,_ bags dropped and he feels the air shift around him as two bodies rush towards a collision –

 _‘Karen,’_ he’s shouting, and he can’t make sense of it, the shift of limbs and the smell of salt, different to that of the sea – softer, more mellow. _Tears,_ he realises. Tears and the gentle chafe of clothing, hands checking for injuries – or perhaps just running across a chest, as if confirming the reality of the person in front of them.

‘I thought you were dead.’

Her voice is so small, so cracked – and _oh._

Because there it is. That softness. That incredible, terrible vulnerability, Karen Page with every single layer stripped away, just the core of her left.

 _I’m okay,_ he hears, a rumble, barely vibrations in a chest, and it’s a lie – he listens to the groaning protest of fractured ribs – but it’s good enough, apparently.

He turns his face towards the sea, lets the cold shock of air coming in distract him from what he thinks, at first, is a kiss – but he listens closer, and no. Ragged breaths and a forehead brushing against the bridge of the nose, perhaps, mouths close but not yet touching, speaking into one another once again _I’m okay. I’m here._  

 _Oh,_ he thinks, as Frank Castle and Karen Page settle on the sand, Karen’s fingers wrapped up in his belt loops, as if to keep him close by force. And that’s such a Karen thing, to take a beast by the hand and draw him in so deep that he stays and makes his home there inside her chest. Such a Karen thing that it makes sense, somehow.

He walks away. He’s not sure that they notice. Leaves them there on the sand together, and when he calls Karen next week to ask her if she wants to get frozen yoghurt again, she is happy and pleasant and says that she will see him soon, but she is firm when she says no.

 

**Author's Note:**

> me from the back: NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU MATT  
> based on this amazing prompt from kastleus on tumblr:  
> kastle through matt's eyes maybe? all the angst. post punisher s1. or not. wherever ur muse takes u. love ur writing <3  
> this was a real challenge cause i've never written from matt's perspective before and, obviously, sINCE HE CAN'T SEE it's tough to write his perspective on something apart from his interiority. super interesting though and i loved it!  
> find me on tumblr as hipsterfrankcastle <3


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